Happy Eid

Now that we've had five years of lumping all Muslims together in with the evil empire which wants to eat your babies, kill your television, and force you to make bad fashion decisions, I'm happy to announce that I have applied for North Korean nationality and that I shall shortly be moving to live there, taking my own supplies of rice, large rabbits and a prayer mat.

Stereotyping has gone on for hundreds of years - it's something at which we in the west are particularly good, but only since the current wave of anti-colonial resistance took on epic and vicious proportions have we been encouraged to collectively vilify Islam. What concerns me is that creating scapegoats is a habit we have diligently maintained in Europe, mostly by practicing pogroms against Jews over the last 2,000 years, and that this tendency towards prejudice and violence, which seemed to be dying away during the relative enlightenment of the 1960s and 1970s, has been steadily increasing ever since, with a marked upturn of late.

Growing up after the Nazi war in a left-leaning household, we were well-educated about bigotry and racism, with South African apartheid the shining example of how not to run a country playing out before our eyes. But nobody adequately explained the middle east to us, and the fact of Israel's imposition upon the Arab population. Nobody explained the reasons for the Arab anger; they were just angry. Nobody said, they are angry because they just had their homes, their gardens, towns and villages destroyed, or stolen from them. They cannot visit their own relatives, they cannot leave the prison which their land has become, or if they manage to leave, they will not be allowed back.

The inherent racism of Israel's violent theocracy has been hushed up in modern Britain, almost as an apology for past crimes, the sin of not preventing the concentration camps, latent guilt about our own ancient role in the Jewish holocaust, as if Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists did not suffer equally under the same evil.

The British legacy as a nation is peppered with horrific episodes. The British invented concentration camps during the Boer War, incarcerating and killing 27,000 women and children, causing appalling suffering to the Afrikaaners. Sometimes, when I meet people who suffer today as a direct result of past British failure, I feel obliged to point out that my own ancestors were not responsible for this state of affairs, these awful crimes of history. It helps me feel no guilt for being born here, and it keeps me aware of our immense privileges and responsibilities.

In fact, we British peasants were as much victims of the British ruling class as Indians and Africans, Jews and Arabs. Left to our own devices, instead of being forced off the land by the Enclosures Acts and into the slums and the new city factories during the Industrial Revolution (a misnomer if ever there was one), we Brits would still probably be artisans, traders, and smallholders living in a green land, free from pollution and terrorism. We'd maybe own a lot less, but we would almost certainly be happier. We wouldn't have lost four million in World War One.


For what it's worth, I'm quite certain that none of my personal family past is connected to the tiny percentage of this supposedly mighty nation who wrought such damage. During the war, my grandparents took in Jewish refugees, and after it, Germans. My grandfather stood with the Jewish East Londoners against Mosley's British fascists at the battle of Cable Street. Both my grandmother and grandfather fought for votes for women, and prior to that, their Baptist forebears campaigned against slavery. This knowledge of some of my personal family history, along with the way I have lived myself, helps me to counter stereotyping which applies to British people as a result of our country's continuing aggressive militancy.

I love my country too much to be a patriot. Nationalism, stereotyping, colonialism, bigotry and brutality always seem to go hand in hand. My loyalty lies with the people of all nations who, having little, when the shit hits the fan, stand with their communities first, in the knowledge that this boat we are in is the only one we have, and any hole, moral or otherwise, is liable to sink us all.

Instead, I try to live according to the great Jean Genet, the French dramatist imprisoned for his renegade lifestyle, who when released said, on the prison steps, "I return to my home - the world."